There's essentially a hard and and easy way to explain why people don't ask questions. Let's start easy and work to hard.
My wife loves me more than anyone else. If you added up the love anyone else on the planet had for me, it wouldn't equal half the amount she feels for me. She's been my partner for more than a decade. She's seen the best and worst of me. For crying out loud, every once in a while, we walk in on each other going to the bathroom (that is some serious love).
Having said all that, my wife will go weeks without asking me a question about my day and important events I know I've told her are coming up. So is the wife actually an evil person who is plotting against me, when all along I thought we were riding life's waves together? No. What she actually is, is a skimmer.
My wife makes sure that our three kids have clean clothes. That we don't die of scurvy (she mixes in fruits). She has two jobs. She tries to have friends and usually least amongst everything else, she tries to take care of her self. So with the 60 minutes we have alone together each night before we pass out, she is usually just skimming for information. Her maternal instincts take precedent. Did anyone die today? Did anyone bleed? Did you tell your daughter you loved her? Then its business items: Did you pay the electricity bill? Any chance to sent your mom a Cinco De Mayo Card? On to personal grooming: Did you shower - you smell?
She's just covering the basics. She's skimming for information to make sure that we can at least get through tomorrow. By the time she's done, she usually has one brain cell left and that is used to watch the Bachelorette.
That's what everyone is doing these days, we are all just skimming. I love to read long form articles on the web. ESPN, The Atlantic, New Yorker, Rolling Stone. The skimming theory really hit me when a friend emailed me about an article we both read and commented on how offensive it was. I didn't recall it being offensive at all, but when I searched to bring it back up...there were all sorts of reviews about how biased the author was in righting about the subject. I re-read and sure enough, the author was way off base. But I was so busy skimming and sticking with only major plot lines, I wasn't getting the context of the story.
Think about our lives these days. Skimming for nuggets about friends on Facebook. In and out of world events with only what NPR tells us. Reading only the NY Times book reviews. When was the last time anyone listened to a full album of music? Conversation with my mom only occur If I can fit them in on a long drive. I ask my kids only the two most important parts of their day and generally ignore the context of the entire day. I read of people who get so overwhelmed by the amount information available when researching vacations, they end up not going.
In this day and age with so much data and technology its impossible to be bored and the only way we can survive is to skim it.
